Donald Trump Jr. Doesn’t Seem to Realize That His Messages with WikiLeaks Are a Very Bad Look for Him

Donald Trump Jr. seems to be a living example of why nepotism is a bad idea. Not because of the questionable ethics, but because everything he touches turns into a pain for Donald Trump and the people around him, whether it's meeting with Russian lawyers under weird circumstances or, in this case, just texting with WikiLeaks.

The Atlantic obtained a bunch of direct messages between WikiLeaks and Trump Jr., from September 2016 to as recently as July 2017. They made a lot of requests, asking Trump Jr. to have his dad promote certain articles, asking that Julian Assange be made Australia's ambassador to the U.S., and even encouraging Trump to refuse to concede if he lost the election. One telling message came when WikiLeaks tried to convince him to give them Trump's tax returns for them to "leak":

"If we publish them it will dramatically improve the perception of our impartiality,” WikiLeaks explained. “That means that the vast amount of stuff that we are publishing on Clinton will have much higher impact, because it won’t be perceived as coming from a ‘pro-Trump’ ‘pro-Russia’ source.” It then provided an email address and link where the Trump campaign could send the tax returns, and adds, “The same for any other negative stuff (documents, recordings) that you think has a decent chance of coming out. Let us put it out.”

As The Atlantic points out, U.S. intelligence agencies believe that the Russian government was using WikiLeaks as a way to disperse hacked information, and in this message WikiLeaks seems to be looking for ways to push back against that perception and to seem less anti-Clinton while... publishing a "vast amount of stuff" on Clinton.

Trump Jr. didn't reply to this message, or to many others, but he did reply to some. And an even bigger deal is that the first time he did so, he promptly told KellyAnne Conway, Steve Bannon, and Jared Kushner to let them know that he was in touch with WikiLeaks. Now the Trump campaign was famously chaotic and unorganized, so it's reasonable to think these officials never told anyone else (hell, they may have never even believed Trump Jr. in the first place). But 15 minutes after WikiLeaks sent one message, Trump tweeted “Very little pick-up by the dishonest media of incredible information provided by WikiLeaks. So dishonest! Rigged system!”

Julian Assange is pushing back on the story, saying it confirms just how savvy and nonpartisan WikiLeaks is:

It's hard to not be skeptical when Assange claims that WikiLeaks, an organization that supposedly traffics in transparency, doesn't keep records. Especially since Trump Jr. just tweeted the whole thing (his Twitter feed remains a goldmine of dirty laundry and failed attempts to go viral). It also doesn't really explain the whole Australian ambassador to the U.S. thing.